Companies using WeChat can be divided into two types, one is promoting products, another is expanding brand visibility.

What are their marketing methods through WeChat? And what are the different between marketing model on a big company and a small business?

Targeted Audience

The first step for companies to promote through WeChat is to understand who the audiences are. If the audience is not clear, even advertising expense costs a lot, the business does not turn good. For example, cosmetics companies need to focus on girls and young women while training institutions aim at students and parents.

Publicizing in “sharing moment” and Notifications

Today’s audience and network users are surrounded by colorful information and multimedia forms, it is hard for companies to attract customers if they do not innovate promoting methods and create eyes-catching content. On WeChat, large and famous companies like Dior(Dior is the first company to advertise on “sharing moment”) and Innisfree will invest advertisement on “sharing moment”, which is the homepage for users to see friends updates. As for small and medium businesses tend to set up official account and push notifications to followers. In this way , they afford low advertising fee even free advertisement.

Consumer Survey

It is easily for companies to do a consumer survey on WeChat, and such survey always need to cover employee benefits. For example, several years ago I joined a WeChat group set by a Yogurt company called LePur, and staffs introduce their product in this group. What is surprise is that, once we complete the digital survey form, we can get a 15 yuan coupon. Many members in this group transmitted this activity link to their “sharing moments” and call for their friends to join the group and draw the survey. LePur gained popularity among WeChat users and built an excellent cyclical effect.

This is the link that my friend transmit to me. Fill a form to get a 15 yuan coupon.

Staff Service

If you buy a product or book a ticket and need after-sale service, what would you do? To call the company? But you need to pay calling fee and the line’s maybe always busy. To email them? But you need to write a lot explain the problem and wait for a long time to receive reply … Why not try to contact by WeChat if the company has WeChat official account or service account!

Actually, it is a time-saving and high-efficient method. On weChat, you can use voice to state your problem even send photos of broken items to the staff.

Here is two examples of after-sale service account, one is EPS (united express parcels) in Australia another is CSA(China Southern Airlines). CSA can offer faster and better service because they design different question items for customers.

Celebrities on WeChat are quite different from those on Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo, they are not movie stars, not singers and not politicians. They are only famous for their attractive articles on WeChat.

How to sign up a personal WeChat public account?

Personal email address and ID information are required. It only takes several minutes to set up a Wechat public account. When it finishes, only your account name and notifications that you push can be seen by other Wechat users, other personal details are still protected by Wechat.

Several successful celebrities’ accounts

1.About moods and feelings

This type of articles is popular on WeChat, people would forward to their own WeChat and express their feelings and understanding if they are moved.

These two accounts, one is FORGET ROAD and the other one is STUO. They both push the notification with the theme of “loneliness”, but in different forms of expressions. FORGET ROAD puts a Korea song and a gif picture while STUO covers pictures and animated images.

Philosophical thinking

The targeted audience can be people who meet with difficulties and need advices in their life. They are more likely to store up these articles because these resonate their experience, such as notification of “ten tips for attitude adjustment” .

About entertainment industry

Some famous WeChat accounts may push articles about stars and entertainment activities to capture people’s eyes. They often push videos that show how to imitate a pop star’s makeup. Followers of these WeChat accounts are mainly girls, definitely.Here is a famous account called Soyong, which focus on stars and celebrities. In this notification, he introduced Natalia Vodianova, the wife of the LV inheritor. We can see the number of viewers is more than 100 thousand and many people give their comments at the bottom of the article.

just for laughs

Funny videos made by celebrities are also popular. Workers and students feel tired after one day’s working and studying and follow funny WeChat account is a good choice for them to relax.Here is an account of ” PAPI” , a funny girl who put a notification of funny video made by herself every Monday.

” PAPI”

How they interact with viewers and gain income?

At the end of the following notification, WeChat users can write down their comment(questions, feelings, experience and so on) and get replies from the author. Then the author can pick up good comments and share them in the comment field. If other browsers like the opinion or question, they can click the thumb to show their love.

Actually, the main sources of motivation of all WeChat celebrities are page views and reward from sponsors. When their articles on WeChat gain popularity and thousand of hundred of fans, they will receive co-operation opportunities with advertising partners and public advertisements in their articles with words or pictures.

In this video, I interview an editor in Dianping company on 1 Queens Rd, Melbourne. I mainly ask what is their operation model and how they use WeChat to broadcast information and promote themselves.

Dianping.com is one of the most popular websites in China that shows city highlights and attractions. This branch company only focus on information in Melbourne. What they push on WeChat are useful, helping people explore restaurants, entertainment activities, hotels and tourist attractions.

WeChat, a popular social media, developed fast in recent years in China and even gained favor in many other countries.

It has become a hotspot as the most popular Internet tool in Chinese people daily life, not only ordinary people but also celebrities, companies and so on.

Wechat was launched in 2011 by Tencent company,the user number of Wechat reached one hundred million within one year.In 2015 its users reached 1.1 billion and 762 million are monthly active users. Wechat only focuses on the Chinese market when it was first released but it gradually turns to global market these years. (Figures from expandedramblings)

A Chinese scholar,Liu Zheng interviewed 300 students from 7 leading universities in Zhejiang province. It showed that 85.39% of university students knew news from the Internet, and Wechat was the first resource for these students to acquire news and latest information.（Figures from http://www.toutiao.com/i6311827989868839425/)

News on WeChat attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers every day. How can news organizations do that? What kinds of news are journalists more focus on? You can find answers after you read this blog post.

News subscription accounts

Wechat allows the journalism to have more information channels and offers a fastest channel for news. People can get access to news anywhere and anytime from WeChat application on phone. There are so many news subscription accounts on WeChat and they are competing and cooperating with each other, mutually leading to a better consumer experience.There are examples of news accounts.

Pictures from Trancy’s Wechat account

Tencent news( the only compulsory news account that every WeChat user need to follow), CCTV news and “Welife in Melbourne “, these news organizations push notifications on the WeChat back-end. Different news account focus on different types of news. For example, CCTV tends to push about domestic and global news events especially political news every day. Tencent news is more close to life of citizens, covering news like demolition, entertainment news and extreme weather. “Welife in Melbourne ” is about news happen on Melbourne like “Zombie Walk” and extension of Chadstone.

How news on WeChat work

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Pictures from Trancy’s Wechat account

From These screenshots we can see, a news notification is consist of one heading with pictures and several sub-headings. You are able to open anyone that you are interested by clicking it, then it will unfold as a news article with videos and songs embed.

Model benefits

1.save operating cost

Compared with the old news room, operation on Wechat is more convenient and cost-effective. News organizations especially organizations focusing on life news do not need a real-life company, they can gather materials and edit them in a small room and even do by one person from collecting information to push news articles.

2.become multimedia and concise

WeChat offers a multimedia information platform full of diversity. News organizations can apply plenty of pictures, videos and songs to news articles, making the news become lively and interesting. Pictures and videos are more attractive, eye-catching and more understandable. Apart from multimedia items, news subscription accounts always cut the news into short text and use SEO and key words in the news lead. This is because citizens do not have much time and patience to read a long article as that in the newspaper and website. In order to gain more attention and amount of repost, the news articles on Wechat must be short, attractive and tidy.